How to Use Email Analytics for Email Intelligence

Do you consider successful email delivery the only job an email marketing tool should perform for you? Are you happy with the macro-level statistics – open Rate, click rate, bounce rate, and unsubscribed rate that any common tool provides you?

And is the derived information enough to move your email marketing objectives to the next level? Does your existing email service help you in better campaign monitoring and reduce manual tasks while applying email marketing intelligence?

Modern email marketing goes beyond email database management or open rate and click rate analysis. Now, it is more about knowing your audience better and reaching them with precision. Maximizing email engagement and increasing actionable components are the top most priorities of running any email campaign. It’s the email derived data reproduced with marketing intelligence and presented in an easily understandable graphical format that maximizes your ROI.

An email marketing manager not only needs to identify and collect the important metrics from an email marketing tool, but also put their analytical skills to use to derive actionable points.

In this article, we will take a closer look at what email intelligence you can generate effortlessly and how you should use the data to make your email marketing less burdensome and result oriented.

Using Dashboard Data for Changing Metrics Over Time

An email analytics dashboard gives you information about how an individual email campaign performs in terms of open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, bounce rate, and complaint rate. To make the available data more meaningful and action driven, you may add another metric called ‘goals’ and then run A/B testing to ensure which email campaign performs better with your set of audience.

‘Goal’ is the parameter you set based on your email campaign target. The target could be a sign-up form being filled out by a recipient, a referral visit to your website with minimum 2 minutes of stay time, a direct reply on the email, or a total of all these.

Once you’ve gathered that email intelligence and know which campaign works best for you based on the A/B testing results over a period of time, the next step is to drill down to the successful elements of your message. Did the subject line, CTA button, or the form fields contribute to the success? Was it the time, or day to send an email that worked wonders? Once you have a convincing amount of data, the next step is to follow it for the rest of your email campaign. A month of rigorous testing may produce enough email intelligence insights that you can use it to drive campaigns for at least next 3 to 4 months.

Using Hour of the Day and Day of the Week Data

The email opens, email clicked, and email unsubscribed data collected based on time-of-day and day-of-week preference can help optimize your email campaign to a great extent. The insights tell you the most responsive time when you can send your message for better yields. With that type of email intelligence and the available data, you can go one step ahead and set email execution time and day preference for selected subscribers. Just create a few separate groups of target audience based on the metrics, schedule separate time and date, and then roll the stone.

Using Email Conversion Tracking Feature

This is one of the most sought after bits of email intelligence that anybody would like to know, measure and control to realize ROI. A good email marketing service provider should be able to track the number of sign-ups, web page visits and sales activities that happen on your website through links from your email campaigns. Simply add a tracking code to your website and monitor the email conversions on a monthly basis.

Once you gather the conversion data for a quarter, analyze what type of email campaigns contributed most to the total. If the best performing campaigns point to a particular product or a service that you have promoted recently through emails or newsletters, you get real consumer feedback without any additional investment. The insights can be further analyzed to determine the next line of products or services to be launched.

Using Social Sharing Statistics to Your Advantage

In addition to open rate and click rate performance, the social buzz of your emails generated over the Web can also help you optimize your email marketing message. A good email automation platform should be able to provide statistics like Tweet counts, likes and comments from important social networks. The popularity score of your email messages tells you which social media platforms respond better for your campaign and how to make the most of that channel during your next campaign.

Using Email Client Statistics for Email Template Optimization

Metrics like how many recipients use Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo or iPhone to receive emails, how many recipients are Desktop vs Mobile client users, or which browser (Chrome, Firefox, IE) gives the best email view, can help you optimize your email message, email template, and its deliverability.

For example, a responsive email template can yield better ROI for both desktop and mobile users in comparison to a non-responsive template. Monitoring and nurturing this email intelligence followed by some real action ensures success for future email campaigns.

Investing in a Good Email Marketing Tool

Following the above email intelligence analysis steps keeps you informed about the performance of your email campaigns and helps you remain focused on the corrective actions. However, performing all these steps successfully depends on the email marketing tool you use.

A good tool enables you to generate automatic reports including autoresponder statistics on a regular basis. Reports in the form of easy-to-read graphs help you identify weak areas of your email message and tweak them for better results. If your tool has a one-click segmentation feature enabled, you can easily narrow down the email recipient list, and send custom messages to those who opened or clicked your email earlier. For those who did not respond to your email, the message can be further modified and sent again.

Thus, email intelligence can really improve the overall performance of your email campaigns. Subscribing to a good email marketing tool can reduce data aggregation and organizational effort to a great extent and present you actionable metrics.

Tracking Photo via Shutterstock, Email Analytics Dashboard Photo: Getresponse

This article, "How to Use Email Analytics for Email Intelligence" was first published on Small Business Trends